Wednesday, January 25, 2017

Politics and Reality Radio: How Fragile Is Democracy?, Life Under Authoritarian Gov Can Be Dull & Tolerable
with Joshua Holland

To kick off this week's show, Joshua Holland lays out an entirely plausible scenario in which Trump -- and unified GOP control of government -- results in only manageable damage to the republic. It's not a prediction, which would be pollyannish, but it could work out this way if decent people stand up against what's coming.

Then we'll speak with Yascha Mounk, a lecturer at Harvard, who argues that it's easier than most people believe for even established democracies to slide into authoritarianism.

Picking up on that theme, Cornell's Tom Pepinsky relays some lessons from Malaysia. He says that today's authoritarian governments bear little resemblance to the totalitarian dystopias of our collective imagination -- and argues that the popular image of authoritarian rule is problematic in the age of Trump.